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wood

Do you have any boxes of Walmart house brand Black Angus beef burgers with Vidalia onions lurking in your freezer? If so, time to check labels: almost 90,000 pounds of that specific burger type (about 44,784 boxes) has been recalled because there may be “extraneous wood materials” in the meat. [More]

In case you hadn’t noticed (or if you live south of the Equator), it’s almost winter. For many people, that means firing up the old wood-burning fireplace. But before you try to save money by buying firewood in bulk, here are some tips to make sure you don’t get burned. [More]

James’ seven-year-old daughter was happily noshing on her Quaker Natural Granola when she came across this chunk of wood. Quaker was quick to send James a coupon so he could buy more woody granola from Costco, but then offered a refund when reminded that the bulk warehouse doesn’t accept manufacturer’s coupons.

It’s hard to think of an object that isn’t made of wood or packaged or encounters wood at some point in its journey through the economy. Any number of household items that you can buy at Walmart, like a toilet seat for instance, may very well be made from Russian wood.

Cremation is catching fire as Americans look for low-cost, low-resource alternatives to burial. Cremation often costs half as much as traditional funerals – $4,000 instead of $8,000 – and does not require wood or land space. This combination is putting the heat on traditional funeral homes.

In theory, death care should be immune from short-term economic swings. Death is one of only two sure things in life, and the U.S. population is aging.

In the second issue of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad (before the Comics Code hit and it ostensibly became a “magazine”. You know, like Cracked or The New Yorker), Wally Wood illustrated a story called “Blobs”. In it, gelid human midgets flew their flying robot scooters around a futuristic Fritz Lang cityscape without the slightest use of the flaccid appendages of their arms and legs. They had been made superfluous by the forward progress of science. The eponymous human blobs also wore gigantic vacuum-tube computers on their heads that spoke their thoughts aloud in a capital letter robot font, and by merely pumping a quarter into a vending machine, they could make out with a Rita Hayworth titanium robot.

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